Marketing Mix (4Ps) — free online maker
Product, price, place, promotion — make the four decisions agree with each other. Guided prompts on every block, autosave in your browser, and one-click PDF export.
20-30 minutes to a first draft4 blocks How to fill it in
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What is the Marketing Mix (4Ps)?
The marketing mix is the set of decisions that puts an offer in front of a buyer: what you sell (product), what it costs (price), where it can be bought (place), and how anyone finds out (promotion). The 4Ps have organised those decisions since the 1960s, and they remain the fastest way to spot the one that contradicts the others.
The test of a good mix is coherence. A premium product with discount pricing, or a mass-market product promoted in a niche channel, fails not because any single decision is wrong but because they disagree. Fill in all four quadrants and read them against each other — the contradiction is usually visible within minutes.
The 'marketing mix' idea comes from Neil Borden (1950s); E. Jerome McCarthy condensed it into the four Ps in Basic Marketing (1960). Services marketing later extended it to 7Ps by adding people, process, and physical evidence.
Use it when…
- Launching a product or entering a new market
- Diagnosing why a good product is not selling
- Auditing an existing offer after a competitor or price shift
- Aligning a marketing plan before spending on promotion
The 4 blocks, in the order to fill them
- 1
Product
What exactly are we selling, and why would anyone care?
The offer itself: features, quality level, design, packaging, range, and the services wrapped around it — warranty, support, returns. Define it from the buyer's side, as the problem it solves rather than the thing it is.
How to fill this block - 2
Price
What does it cost the buyer, in every sense?
List price, discounts, payment terms, bundles — and the non-money costs like switching effort. Price is the only P that produces revenue; the other three produce costs.
How to fill this block - 3
Place
Where can the buyer actually get it?
Distribution: the channels through which the product reaches the buyer — direct, retail, marketplaces, distributors — plus coverage, inventory, and logistics. The governing question is where your buyer already shops, not where you would prefer to sell.
How to fill this block - 4
Promotion
How does the buyer find out, and what convinces them?
Advertising, content, PR, sales promotion, direct outreach, and personal selling. Two disciplines keep this block honest: match the message to what the product block claims, and match the channel to where the place block says buyers are.
How to fill this block
Worked 4Ps examples
Complete, realistic canvases with an analysis of what each one reveals. Open one on its own page, or load it straight into the editor above.
4Ps FAQs
What are the 4Ps of marketing?
Product (what you sell and the services around it), price (what it costs the buyer and what that signals), place (the channels through which buyers can get it), and promotion (how buyers find out and what persuades them). E. Jerome McCarthy formalised the framework in 1960, and it remains the standard structure for a marketing plan.
What is the difference between the 4Ps and the 7Ps?
The 7Ps extend the mix for services by adding people (everyone who delivers the experience), process (how the service is produced and consumed), and physical evidence (the tangible cues that signal quality, like premises or documentation). If you sell a service, the extra three usually matter more than promotion does. You can add them here as extra notes in the product block, or run the 4Ps and note service factors where they bite.
Which P should I start with?
Product, because the other three are consequences of it: the price must match its quality claim, the place must be where its buyers shop, and the promotion must repeat its core benefit. When a mix feels wrong, though, price is the most common culprit — it is the P most often set by habit or by copying a competitor.
Is the 4Ps framework still relevant for digital products?
Yes — the decisions have not changed, only the options. Place now includes app stores, marketplaces, and your own site; promotion includes content, SEO, and lifecycle email; price includes freemium and usage-based models. The coherence test is identical: a premium SaaS product with a bargain price tier and no onboarding still contradicts itself.